This formerly German city of Konigsberg and its nearby port on the Baltic Sea, Baltisk, once Pillau, were the Soviet Union's most forward military base facing the West, a place of high interest for NATO's strategists. It remains a region of...

November 27, 1995, Monday

The road into this remote Laotian village of thatched huts and wooden shacks cuts through mountains that are home to many of Southeast Asia's tigers and elephants. This is a region where few people move on wheels, bicycles included, where it is not...

September 10, 1995, Sunday

"We have 1,200 kilometers of frontier with Thailand, and what we hear and see comes from them," said Dara Kanlagna, an official of the Culture Ministry in Laos. "The younger generation all accept this," she said. "With the market economy that we...

August 20, 1995, Sunday

Singapore's astonishing economic boom is reflected in a cityscape that has been totally transformed in three decades of independence. What was a typical Asian port city, with stately buildings of colonial rule set apart from warrens of squalid...

August 13, 1995, Sunday

The bombs that the United States Air Force dropped in profusion over the vast, mountainous stretches of this country that adjoin Vietnam are continuing to kill and maim Laotians more than two decades later. Scattered all over eastern Laos are...

August 10, 1995, Thursday

A teen-age girl grinned gleefully at a foreigner as she caught up with the chicken that had got away on the muddy street in front of the National Bank and the local office of the International Monetary Fund. Scolding the fowl, she clutched it to her...

August 6, 1995, Sunday

As Laos, a vital but virtually forgotten battleground of the Vietnam War, prepares to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Communist "people's democracy," it remains a place of harsh inequalities. It is a country of 4.5 million people where a...

July 30, 1995, Sunday

Digging through Polish Communist Party archives for a study of farm collectivization, Dariusz Jarosz, a 35-year-old scholar, realized that he had struck historical gold: a cache of reports by secret-police informers on the mood of ordinary country...

January 26, 1995, Thursday

The grand boulevard that is this bedraggled capital's main street has sprung to a life it never knew before. The avenue once bore Stalin's name but now has a name good for all political seasons -- Boulevard of the Heroes of the Nation. It stretches...

December 22, 1994, Thursday

There are many ethnic disputes that keep Balkan governments at loggerheads, but the one between Greece and Albania seems to find little echo among the people themselves. Greece and Albania speak to each other harshly, have expelled diplomats and...